[Uml-devel] Wish for redesign

[E.L. Willighagen]

On Friday 25 October 2002 07:51, Sebastian Stein wrote:
> Andrew Sutton <ansutton at kent.edu> [021025 07:07]:
> > 1. Who are our primary customers (target audience for this application)?
>
> Maybe we are building the tool for:
>
> - a small group of professionals who want to use such a tool in their
>   sparetime
> - students
> - a maybe increasing number of commercial developers, who are going to
>   support the Unix environment
>
> But I think that the "hacker" would never use such a tool. And most
> commercial developers are from big companies and such companies have their
> own tools and processes to develop software. Maybe we could adress people
> in small companies who want to do UML, but the financal risk to invest in a
> expensive tool is to high.

Not true. There is at least one... I consider myself a 'hacker', being a 
person who tries to do stuff which is not yet possible or not originally 
intended to do so with some certain hard/software... Which is in the very 
nature of every scientist! Basically, every scientist is a hacker...

It is true that true hackers (aka scientists) often do not bother with design 
when writing/building their first creation... Concern is proof-of-concept!

However, this does not mean that hackers are interested in design. In 
contrast, they are much! If they want to hack their newly build creation, 
this often involves a redesign! And for this they actually use 
methods/software that people from industry would use too. 

And, in constrast to what you said, hackers are interested in Umbrello (again, 
at least those involved in the OS projects I am working on!), but the lack of
good OS tools was in the way of doing this...

> > 2. What services can we build into the application to make it more
> > available to open source developers (i.e. hackers)

Hacker != open source developer. The goals of these two persons is different.

> Good questions, I think this would need some kind of research ;-)
>
> > 3. How can we get open source developers to use it?

Important goal is tools to make diagrams based on available software to 
analyze the structure of the source code. This does not only involve class 
diagrams, but more importantly autogeneration of flow charts (of which I 
forgot the proper UML name) based on the source code (which would require 
some user interaction)...

> I think only by showing how fast development can get with such a tool. We
> can also support them in reducing the time needed to generate code
> documentation and so on.
>
> > 4. How can we reduce the learning curve of UML?
>
> Writing small tutorials and add them to our webpage. I would like to do
> this, but before I do this I need a) more time and b) more knowledge about
> UML ;-)

Yes, that is true. On major problem of UML is the lack of open content 
tutorials about it. There is still a large "UML=Rational Rose" atmosphere 
around UML...

> > 5. How can we reduce the "process association" affiliated with designing
> > software as opposed to writing software. that is, can we fool hackers
> > into adopting even the most trivial of processes for writing open source
> > software?
>
> I don't think so. But on the other hand I'm thinking of people like the
> guys of KMyMoney (with the nice development handbook). I think they would
> be a group of interest.
>
> > 6. How can we make the application more available (easier to use) for
> > hackers?  Would this affect its full range of capabilities for
> > professional software engineers?
>
> I think the app must support a lot of things developers don't like to do
> like writing documentation.

I do not consider Umbrello an important tool in writing documentation. I think 
it is far more interesting as to consider it a tool to explain algorithms.

Egon